choosing a default font family for Chinese and Japanese (was: an.tmac with Japanese man page)

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-04-30T21:21:11+0100, Deri wrote:
> When viewing Japanese man pages it used to be necessary to pass the
> flag -f setting the default font family to a Japanese font which
> affected both the body of a man page and the headings, in bold, when
> viewing the grops output of a japanese man page. In 1.23.0-rc4 this no
> longer works, for headings, you have to set the HF register to the
> Japanese bold font.
> 
> It seems that an.tmac sets the font family to T (for headings), even
> if the user has changed the default family with the -f flag. Should I
> open a savannah issue, or is this change in behaviour intended?

Thanks for the ticket, Deri.[1]

The fix is a one-liner, as it is for the `HP` one Alex reported this
weekend.

Longer term and broader scape, this raises an issue for me.  Since Times
doesn't have glyph coverage for Chinese or Japanese, it makes a lousy
default family for those languages.

We might need to start thinking about loosening the invariant that the
default family is always 'T'.  The formatter could still start up that
way, but maybe the ja.tmac and zh.tmac (and potential future ko.tmac)
localization macro files should pick something else.

Tanaka Takuji's proposed patch for better CJK font support[2] has a bit
of background on potential naming schemes for such fonts in groff.  The
mapping of available CJK font repertoire to groff's tiers of "family",
"font", "style" (and, as you have proposed, "foundry" on top), may
require some thought.[3]

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64130
[2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62830

[3] Some good news, though.  I was finally able to raid my storage unit,
    and some of the book boxes I recovered included not only several C++
    titles I'd been missing for years, but also a copy of Ken Lunde's
    doorstop, _CJKV Information Processing_.  I hope to learn something.

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